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Today, I finished our discussion of constitutional vs. absolute monarchy, and I also provided an overview of the Age of Discovery (chapter 16). Recall from 1/25 that with the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the selection of William and Mary as king and queen, Great Britain was well on its way to developing a strong system of limited and constitutional monarchy. France had a much different history during this period. England ended the 17th century as a constitutional monarchy which embraced a level of religious toleration (among Protestants and Catholics). On the other hand, France by 1700 was ruled by an absolute monarch who had decreed Catholicism the only acceptable religion and had effectively ended the role of the French aristocracy in decision making. The French king Henry IV (r. 1589-1610) successfully curtailed the powers of the French nobility, which was a much larger and more divided group than the English barons. However, Henry IV had established a policy of limited religious toleration. The Edict of Nantes (1598) gave Protestants basic religious freedoms, although France remained a Catholic state. Henry also established government monopolies on a number of basic goods, thereby ensuring the crown a source of revenues not dependent on the consent of the aristocracy. Henry was assassinated in 1610, and was succeeded by his son, Louis XIII (r. 1610-1643). Louis, however was only 9 years old at the time, so the governance of France was placed in the hands of his mother. She in turn relied on a French prelate, Cardinal Richelieu, who served as chief adviser. Cardinal Richelieu was the architect of a much more strongly centralized French state. Disobedient nobles were often imprisoned or executed. Richelieu also began to abandon Henry IV's policy of religious toleration, ruthlessly suppressing French Huguenots (a growing Protestant group). Finally Richelieu oversaw several French wars of conquest, which made France a major European power. Richelieu died in 1642; his patron Louis XIII died the following year. Louis XIV became king in 1643, but he was only 5 at the time. So another prelate, Cardinal Mazarin, took over the government. Between 1649 and 1652, a series of revolts shook France, and for a brief time Louis XIV and Mazarin went into exile. However, regional nobles turned out to be ineffective governors, and this short period convinced many French people that a strong monarch was indeed preferable to rule by the divided nobility. In 1661, Mazarin died, and Louis XIV, now in his early 20's took over. Louis XIV is the 17th century monarch most closely identified with the "Divine Right of Kings." He believed in absolute control ("L'etat, c'est moi": "I am the state") and created an elaborate court life that virtually emasculated the French nobility and made him the center of all activity. Louis also embraced Cardinal Richelieu's anti-Protestantism, formally revoking the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Finally, Louis undertook a series of wars against France's neighbors, extending French territorial control in western Europe and strengthening a sense of French militarism and nationalism that would reach its apex during the Napoleonic period. So by the time Louis XIV died in 1715, England and France were on two very different courses. In England, constitutional monarch would slowly and relatively peacefully develop into a meaningful democracy. In France, change would have to be much more radical and violent. The French Revolution, which would begin in 1789, would completely change social and political relations and be the transformative event in the emergence of a modern Europe. More on that next week. Most of continental Europe followed the absolutist model of government epitomized by France. Spain, for example, had become a strong, centralized monarchy with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon (r. 1479-1516) and Isabella of Castille (r. 1474-1504). Of course, Ferdinand and Isabella are more well known for having underwritten the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World, thus heralding a new phase in the history of western civilization. I spoke very briefly about the circumstances leading up to Europe's Age of Discovery. The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to be aided by the technologies borrowed from other societies, such as the Arab caravel (a type of sailing ship) and the Chinese compass. Astrolabes, quadrants, and sextants allowed navigators to approximate the attitude of heavenly bodies, thus enabling them to determine their own latitude. These technologies, and the rediscovery of ancient Greek scientists such as Ptolemy (c. 90-168 C.E.) led to a renewed interest in cartography (mapmaking). (Of course, Ptolemy and other ancients had perpetuated many misconceptions about the geography of the earth, misconceptions that would be had by Columbus and other 15th century navigators.) Besides advances in technology and the rediscovery of ancient manuscripts, new forms of business enterprise, such as joint stock companies, were important in fueling European exploration and colonization. These companies could raise vast sums of capital from investors, and were granted rights to settle, manage and defend proprietary colonies. Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) oversaw the Portuguese exploration of the south Atlantic, establishing trading posts all along the West African coast. As early as 1433, the Portuguese approved the importation of African slaves, who would become a major source of wealth for Portugal. Of course, these slaves were initially destined for sale in Europe, since the Americas had not yet been "discovered." But the main reason the Portuguese explored the African coast was to find an all-water route to India and China. As the European economy emerged out of the Middle Ages, an increasingly affluent middle and upper class demanded more goods from Asia, which had always been an important source of luxuries for western Europeans. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias, sailing for Portugal, rounded the southern tip of Africa, but was forced to turn back before reaching India. Meanwhile, a Genoese (Italian) sea captain, Christopher Columbus, had convinced Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain that the water route to Asia was westward, across the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, like Ptolemy, Columbus greatly underestimated the distance to Asia, and didn't realize that the Americas, not to mention the Pacific Ocean, stood in between. But Columbus' "discovery" of the New World created a whole new source of wealth for western Europe, first Spain and Portugal, but later France, England and the Netherlands too. Columbus himself made 3 subsequent journeys to this hemisphere (the last in 1502), during which he searched for gold, and sought the enslavement of native or Amerindian peoples. He died in 1506, still incorrectly believing he had reached Asia. (Amerindian populations suffered significant decline with European contact and exploitation -- mostly from Old World diseases --, and during the 16th century the Spanish and Portuguese began to turn to Africa as a source of slave labor for the New World.) (In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa, thus establishing for the Portuguese the much sought-after water route to Asia. Only after Ferdinand Magellan's ill-fated circumnavigation of the globe (1519-1522) did Europeans realize their actual distance from Asia.) With Europe's "expansion" into the New World, the forms of commerce, social relations, and political organization that had developed through the Middle Ages would be challenged, and Europe would begin its long, sometimes violent transition to modernity. This is an important part of the story of Western Civilization II. |